It was a good idea to call the soul ‘the place of forms’, though (1) this description holds only of the intellective soul, and (2) even this is the forms only potentially, not actually. – Aristotle
[Note: In my previous posts, I spoke about Aristotelians and Thomists as being innatist in their epistemology. I should have been more clear about this terminology because realists are not innatists in the Platonic sense. Human beings are not cognitively pre-loaded with the Platonic forms. Aristotelians are innatist in a very strict sense. What is innate, according to classical realists, is the capacity or potential to receive the form, universal, or essence of the sense object as it is in act. (See, for example, the last chapter of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics for further explication.) I will try to develop this theme as we move along.]
In our most recent posts on Berkeleyan idealism, we learned that the mind is structured to receive and apprehend reality as it is. In other words, being is the touchstone of all reality. Being is, and can not be denied (it can not be otherwise because it would be non-being or nothing). We also learned that the intellectual faculty of judgment has both metaphysical (ontological) and epistemic or psychological aspects. When the mind is working correctly, one knows reality. Concrete reality is the proper starting point for metaphysics, not one’s theory about it (one’s theory of reality could be wrong, which is why, again, being is the touchstone of reality). In this post, I will try to explicate the basics of how the intellect works at the foundational level—at the reception of being—what Aristotelian philosophers call the intellect. This will lay the groundwork for why metaphysical realists claim that one can know reality as it is and provides further insight into the distinction between apprehension and concept—the central confusion and philosophical error among idealists, although I will develop that in upcoming posts. For now, it is important to understand how the intellect itself works.
First, what is the intellect? The word comes from the Latin terms, intus, and legere—to read within. The intellect is the cognitive capacity that humans have to think rationally, carefully, and logically about the perennial questions of existence as they find it. It is the intellect and the ability to reason which separates humans from animals. Although humans are animals, they are not simply or just animals. It should be obvious that humans have different cognitive abilities than that of animals. In addition to sense knowing, which all animals have, humans have the ability to reflect on and arrive at deeper understandings of their sense knowledge. As noted in previous posts, to sense something and to understand something is not the same thing. I can hear a foreign language but not understand it. My cat can see the same image of a sign on its retina as I do, but have no understanding of what it means, while I can easily grasp its message. Just as humans are different in kind from animals, there must be some faculty in the human mind that is different in kind from simple sense perception. This faculty is called the intellect or what philosophers in the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions call the agent intellect.
The agent intellect is a special faculty of the mind and has two important functions. First, the intellect is in potency to knowledge—it does not know to start with (it requires the act of existence to motivate it because it depends on being, as act is prior to potency). Second, as immaterial, the intellect receives the essence, universal, or form of the external object through sense perception. Aquinas reminds us, “Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense.”1 The senses are the only connection one has to reality. Even so, what comes into the intellect has an immaterial rather than material mode of existence. The tree I am looking at through the window does not exist as a physical tree in my mind. The intellect grasps the form or essence of the sense object. This is because there is an immaterial aspect to all reality. To account for this essential reception, however, there must be a prior ability, capacity, or function in the intellect which apprehends the form of the material object. The same form of the material object exists in the intellect that exists in reality, only the mode of existence is different. This second function of the intellect is an immaterial apprehension of the material form or essence. This is what Aristotle calls the agent intellect and the reason why he calls the intellect, or soul, “the place of the forms.”2 The agent intellect apprehends the essence of the thing perceived. The nature of the agent intellect is to receive the object of sense perception3.
A question remains, however. How do the forms or universals get into the intellect?
The intellect is in potency to knowledge and has a capacity to receive the essence of an external object. Now, it is important to understand how the form or essence of a thing is delivered to the intellect. Briefly, this is accomplished by induction and abstraction. Induction, or inductive reasoning, is the logical process of thinking in which the conclusion follows from experience, examination of particulars, and arriving at generalized or universal principles—for Aristotelians, the foundation of all subsequent reasoning. Aristotle held that wider and wider generalization is derived from repeated empirical experiences of particular things until the essence or universal concept is established in the intellect. Philosopher Ed Miller puts Aristotelian inductive reasoning it this way:
From the experience of the particular man Callias, the man Socrates, the man James, the man Tad, the man Bill … the intellect derives the general or universal idea of man, that is man as such. From the experience of the particular dog Fido, the dog Lassie, the dog Rover, the dog Flip … the intellect derives the universal idea dog. And the universal ideas—man, dog, and innumerable other concepts derived from experience in the same manner—become the tools and building blocks of all reasoning. They then make it possible to say and know, “Socrates is a man,” “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” etc.4
Aristotle compares the formation of the universal in the intellect to the formation of soldiers making a stand against a wartime enemy:
We conclude that these states of knowledge are neither innate in a determinate form, nor developed from other higher states of knowledge, but from sense-perception. It is like a rout in battle stopped by first one man making a stand and then another, until the original formation has been restored. The soul is so constituted as to be capable of this process. . . . When one of a number of logically indiscriminable particulars has made a stand, the earliest universal is present in the soul: for though the act of sense-perception is of the particular, its content is universal—is man, for example, not the man Callias. A fresh stand is made among these rudimentary universals, and the process does not cease until the indivisible concepts, the true universals, are established: e.g. such and such a species of animals is a step towards the genus animal, which by the process is a step towards a further generalization. Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premisses by induction; for the method by which even sense-perception implants the universal is inductive.5
In fact, Aristotle believes induction to be the basis of all other knowledge:
From experience again—i.e. from the universal now stabilized in the soul, the one beside the many which is a single identity within them all—originate the skill of the craftsman and the knowledge of the man of science, skill in the sphere of coming to be and science in sphere of being.6
Metaphysics, the study of being as being, is the science in the sphere of being. In other words, metaphysics is a kind of science in the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition. Being is at the center of whatever is thought or done. One can not change the oil in his truck or complete a math equation without referencing being. Being, however, is the first act of knowing. The intellect can only understand the universal or essence of any external object through induction.
Aristotle’s notion of induction is very similar to the concept of abstraction put forward by St. Thomas. Aquinas focuses on the idea that the mind can remove, withdraw, or pull out the concept of redness from viewing various red objects. One understands the concept of justice by examining just actions. Abstraction is a general idea, universal, or essence that the intellect removes from the multiple expressions of the same form found in the particular instances of it (the essential nature of the particular whether it be dog, cat, chair, human, or concepts such as the good, true, beautiful etc.).
St. Thomas helps us understand how the intellect moves from the particular to the universal (here “intelligible species” means essence. “Phantasms” are the mental images of things):
Our intellect cannot know the singular in material things directly and primarily. The reason of this is that the principle of singularity in material things is individual matter, while our intellect … understands by abstracting the intelligible species from such matter. Now what is abstracted from individual matter is the universal. Hence our intellect knows directly the universal only. But indirectly and as it were by a kind of turning back (reflectio), it can know the singular, because … even after abstracting the intelligible species, the intellect, in order to understand actually, needs to turn to the phantasms in which it understands the species. … Therefore it understands the universal directly through the intelligible species, and indirectly the singulars represented by the phantasms. And thus it forms the proposition, “Socrates is a man.”
Classical realists, then, begin with being—the concrete particular things encountered in the sensible external world. Being is more than physical reality but never less than it. With the universal firmly in place in the intellect one is enabled to return and know reality through reflection and judgment. One can genuinely think about reality, know it, and express it, “Socrates is a human being.”
For Further Reading:
Holloway, M., “Abstraction from Matter in Human Cognition”, The Modern Schoolman, Vol. XXIII (1946), pp. 120 – 130.
For a more general introduction to Thomist epistemology see:
Wilhelmsen, Fredrick. Man’s Knowledge of Reality: An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1956.
I wrote about the Aristotelian distinctions of act and potency here.
Works Cited
Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica Volume 1. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 17, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996.
Aristotle. The Works of Aristotle Volume 1. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 7, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996.
Miller, Ed. Questions that Matter: An Invitation to Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.
Footnotes
1Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996) 1a, q.1, art. 9.
2Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima), Trans. by J. A. Smith (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996) 661.
3 While we are distinguishing the important faculties of the intellect, it is also very important to be aware that the whole person is involved in knowing. This requires a bit of development and goes beyond the scope of this post but I plan on explicating this notion in time. For now, it is important to understand that for those in the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition, the entire person is involved in apprehending reality. This is because form and body (matter and form) are united and should never be separated. Not only does the individual know and understand things through deduction and induction, humans also know through connatural knowledge—the lived and embodied contact one has with others and reality itself. This involves knowing through empathy, lived human experience, intuition, and the contact of the intellect with the truth of reality itself by other holistic ways of knowing such as imaginative literature, the arts, and history. Embodied knowledge means knowledge through the whole person and by way of all the arts and sciences. The Platonic tradition sees form and matter as separate which, if unchecked, leads to idealism. Idealism is the result of disembodied knowledge, a disembodied epistemology. Platonist metaphysics rests on the separation of form from matter and provides the foundation for the error of idealism.
4Ed Miller, Questions That Matter: An Invitation to Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996) 235.
5Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (Analytica posteriora), Trans. by G.R.G Mure (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996) 136.
6Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 136.
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